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3.96 AVERAGE
3.96 AVERAGE
emotional
informative
reflective
slow-paced
Picked this book for book club because the film is making the circuits at the Lesbian & Gay film festival and it looked good, and the book is always better than the movie. Since I see the movie on Sunday, I'm hoping that's not true. I felt a bit cheated by the editor, she needed to take out more of the boring and not keep so much code (or use that grammar tool of brackets of you want to keep the original). She also went back and forth between endnotes and comments after an entry. Not sure why, but endnotes are just annoying.
Fascinating insight into a remarkable person. Highly reccomend for anyone wanting a first-person account of women's lives in Regency England, or a first-person account of the difficulties and joys of being a gender-nonconforming queer AFAB person in that period. This edition builds from a slow start, but after a few dozen pages it's impossible to put down.
I removed a star because Whitbread does not make her editorial choices clear - I had to do a great deal of internet research to discover why she has only chosen these selections and not others. The roughly 800,000 words of the diaries during the years 1818-1824 (which is what this volume actually covers, title notwithstanding), have been edited down to about 150,000 words (350 pages) - reasonably enough. What is missing is the context, the explanation for what choices were made and why. A good, solid introduction would completely solve this this glaring scholarly error, but the book is profoundly lacking without one.
So - this is the story of Anne's love affairs between 1818-1824. It is only that - with a little bit of travel thrown in - but it is not all of her travel diaries, nor is it all of the details of her politics or estate management or other parts of her life. This selection is the story of her relationships with Mariana Lawton & Isabella Norcliffe, as well as a couple of minor flirtations, and is drawn from the coded sections of the diaries. If you have been watching Gentleman Jack and you want to read about Anne's relationship with Ann Walker, this book does not contain that - look for Jill Liddington's Nature's Domain, which covers those years.
I removed a star because Whitbread does not make her editorial choices clear - I had to do a great deal of internet research to discover why she has only chosen these selections and not others. The roughly 800,000 words of the diaries during the years 1818-1824 (which is what this volume actually covers, title notwithstanding), have been edited down to about 150,000 words (350 pages) - reasonably enough. What is missing is the context, the explanation for what choices were made and why. A good, solid introduction would completely solve this this glaring scholarly error, but the book is profoundly lacking without one.
So - this is the story of Anne's love affairs between 1818-1824. It is only that - with a little bit of travel thrown in - but it is not all of her travel diaries, nor is it all of the details of her politics or estate management or other parts of her life. This selection is the story of her relationships with Mariana Lawton & Isabella Norcliffe, as well as a couple of minor flirtations, and is drawn from the coded sections of the diaries. If you have been watching Gentleman Jack and you want to read about Anne's relationship with Ann Walker, this book does not contain that - look for Jill Liddington's Nature's Domain, which covers those years.
Most historic accounts of women who had same-sex desires or relationships with women show us only an outside observer's account. The motivations and feelings of the women involved are typically known only via their reports to others--a context where self-editing and self-censoring can be expected. This is why a record such as Anne Lister's can be so ground-breaking to our understanding.
Lister's diaries were never meant for any reader but herself. Key passages were encoded in a cipher to ensure privacy. And she engaged in deep and ruthless self-examination of her life and her desires, which is not to say that she was always successful at being honest with herself. This is no angel or saint. She was a snob. She regularly was less than honest with those around her, not only to protect her reputation but for all the usual casual purposes that grease the wheels of social interaction. Her notions of sexual fidelity are quite flexible. And even when she tries to be forthright with those closest to her about her long-term life plans, she flip-flops in her own heart so often that her messages are not merely mixed, they are pureed and homogenized.
Whitbread has edited two volumes of Lister's diaries, deciphering the writing, decoding the cipher, and excerpting the portions that provide a detailed view of her life and thoughts.
Lister's diaries were never meant for any reader but herself. Key passages were encoded in a cipher to ensure privacy. And she engaged in deep and ruthless self-examination of her life and her desires, which is not to say that she was always successful at being honest with herself. This is no angel or saint. She was a snob. She regularly was less than honest with those around her, not only to protect her reputation but for all the usual casual purposes that grease the wheels of social interaction. Her notions of sexual fidelity are quite flexible. And even when she tries to be forthright with those closest to her about her long-term life plans, she flip-flops in her own heart so often that her messages are not merely mixed, they are pureed and homogenized.
Whitbread has edited two volumes of Lister's diaries, deciphering the writing, decoding the cipher, and excerpting the portions that provide a detailed view of her life and thoughts.
read only the diary for the year 1816-1817 for class: rly interesting and good :D i never knew how many lesbians there were in the 1800s also anne is kinda funny even if i think she’s a bit problematic at times
Totally fascinating. Was introduced like most people to Anne Lister via the BBC show Gentleman Jack, but am now jumping down the rabbit hole of all things Anne. I feel like Anne is the role model I wished I had known about, but grew up to be anyway. Can't wait to read more of her journals, as this one ends in her early 30s.
The Diaries of Anne Lister is definitely the oldest “lesbian” book I’ve read to date. I’m putting lesbian in quotation marks because what is actually the most fascinating things about the diary is how Anne Lister explores her attraction to women and her sexual identity in a time before sexuality was such a defining characteristic for our identities and before the word lesbian even existed with our contemporary understanding of it (if anyone as nerdy as me is wondering, “lesbian” was first used in 1890 as “female homosexual,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary—so it’s really a relatively new word!). Back to Anne Lister: she was an upper-class Englishwoman living in Halifax and Shibden Hall, West Yorkshire in the early 1800s who kept a very comprehensive diary of her life, a significant amount of which was written in a code that Lister herself had created....
see the rest of my review here: http://lesbrary.com/2012/04/20/casey-reviews-i-know-my-own-heart-the-diaries-of-anne-lister-1791-1840-edited-by-helena-whitbread/
see the rest of my review here: http://lesbrary.com/2012/04/20/casey-reviews-i-know-my-own-heart-the-diaries-of-anne-lister-1791-1840-edited-by-helena-whitbread/
Took me 3.5 yrs to read, but worth it! It's a primary source, so not super compelling in of itself, but I'm very very glad I read it.